Themes and Modes: Categorizing the Debris
After going through the materials we collected on our Think Tank Day, Lana and I have been trying out different ways to sort all of these resources. We want to be sure to address the diverse geographic interests brought up in the think tank, from our own angle, participatory culture.
So, when we were grouping together materials, our categories fell mainly in two groups: participatory “modes” and mapping “themes.” These are two ways to slice the same materials, on one side along the modes of participatory culture emerging from the various work at Project NML, and the other along more traditional metaphors from mapping. What does this look like? Here are the categories we are currently working with, a group that is more representative than exhaustive, and a group that we hope will provide a valuable resource to educators interested in mapping and participatory culture:
Modes
Our current list of “modes” reflect some of the topics from our Project NML work:
Civic engagement, engaging popular culture, representational plurality, and modeling real-world systems.
This is very much a preliminary list, and terminology is going to be changed to sound a little less grad student-y (“representational plurality!?” yeesh), but we think it reflects the major intersections between geography and other Project NML work. (By the way, “representational plurality” is our way of getting at the idea that one thing can be represented in multiple ways, and it is important to be conscious of this in creating and consuming media. If you have a better word, post it in the comments!)
Themes
Layers, Boundaries, Production, Physical Spaces, and Stories.
These “themes” generally take features of traditional mapping and use them as metaphors, allowing us to integrate discussions about geography into a variety of other subjects, from the boundaries between social cliques in a cafeteria to the ways history is told via maps. More in-depth explorations of these different themes are forthcoming!
Initially, we wanted to find the overlap between these two sets of categories, say, aligning “stories” with “modeling real-world systems” and fuse them into a single list, but it seemed like this ignored some of the specifically interesting features of the two sets. So instead, we laid them out as axes—themes on the x-axis, modes on the y-axis. Using this conceptual coordinate system as a way to map (ha ha) our own work, we’re literally filling in a spreadsheet with useful examples and resources. So, for example, we’ll look for work that addresses the metaphor of “boundaries” with regard to “civic engagement.” Some of these intersections have clear examples from the think tank and our own research, and we’ll be sharing these here on the blog. Other intersections have us temporarily stumped (engaging popular culture with regard to the production of maps?), and we’ll be sharing those too, looking for interesting ideas.
These lists are a work in progress, and we’re hoping that by sharing them with the community, we’ll be able to get feedback on materials as they’re developed, meeting the needs of educators with an innovative and productive set of teaching resources.
2 years ago